20. Maddie
CHAPTER 20
MADDIE
“ O h, hell,” Maddie murmured.
Tess looked up from her breakfast. “What’s going on? Is everything okay?”
“Kind of. I have a text from Eli.”
“Oh, whoa. What does he want?” Tess leaned over as if intending to read the text right off of Maddie’s phone, and Maddie found herself reminded of how few boundaries her friend had had when they’d lived together. It was something she had adjusted to living without since she’d been at Eli’s — there had been more privacy there. It was good to be back in the familiar space she had shared with her best friend for so long, but she also missed having privacy.
She would have it again when she moved out.
But moving out would mean allowing herself to begin depending on Eli’s money. That was something that was going to have to happen eventually, of course, but Maddie found herself trying to put it off. It felt like she would be accepting his dismissal of her, and she didn’t want to do that. If she’d had her way — if there was any practical way to do it — she would have refused his money. But it would have been foolish and irresponsible to do that, given that there was a baby to care for. Maddie didn’t even have a job. She needed all the help she could get, even if taking it made her feel terrible.
“He wants us to meet for lunch,” Maddie said, reading the text. “Later today. He has a restaurant in mind, and he wants me to come and meet him there.”
“What for?”
“I’m guessing he has the account set up for me,” Maddie said. “He told me he would be in touch about it. He probably wants to give me the documents, or maybe he needs me to sign something.”
“That’s a little quick, isn’t it?”
“Oh, not particularly. Knowing him, he wanted to do it all as hastily as possible,” Maddie said dryly. “Eli cares a lot about things like efficiency and making sure his business is handled. I’m sure he got to work on this the moment I was out of his house. He’d never drag his feet about something like this. It’s only when it comes to taking care of members of his family that he isn’t very responsible.”
“Well, great,” Tess said encouragingly. “You’ll have the account. That’s a good thing, right?”
“I don’t know. I guess it is.” Maddie had mixed feelings about it, for reasons she struggled to fully understand.
“Once you’ve got it, you and I can go shopping,” Tess said eagerly. “We can visit the high-end mall. Go to all the stores we can’t afford to so much as set foot inside most of the time. It’ll be great.”
Maddie laughed. “This account isn’t for us to buy ourselves things,” she told her friend. “We shouldn’t take advantage.”
“I don’t see why not! He should be providing for all of your needs, shouldn’t he?”
“He’s taking care of the baby, not me,” Maddie said. “That was the agreement.”
“The agreement was that he was going to give you an account to use as you saw fit. I don’t see any moral issue with using it for a little retail therapy, especially given the mental and emotional pain and suffering he’s caused you. To me, that seems pretty fitting.”
“Well, it doesn’t feel right to me. And I don’t want him buying me things, anyway,” Maddie added. “I don’t want anything he might have to give me. He can take care of the baby — he should be doing that. But if I bought myself stuff using his account, it would feel like accepting gifts from him. I’ll use this money for the baby, but I am not taking a single dime that I don’t absolutely need to take. I’m doing as much as I can on my own, without any help from him.”
“You and I are very different sometimes,” Tess said. “But fine. If he has the account ready, we’ll go buy a bunch of baby things. We can do that , right?”
“Okay, okay,” Maddie agreed. “That would be all right.” She smiled. “That might be kind of fun, actually. A bunch of cute baby clothes might be just the thing to put me in a better mood.”
“I knew I would convince you. I’ll start making a shopping list while you go and meet with him.”
“Oh, I don’t know if I actually want to meet with him,” Maddie said.
“Why not? Don’t you want to get the account?”
“Yeah, but can’t I get it over text? I’m sure he can text me the information.”
“You want him to send you bank information by text? Come on, Maddie, you know that’s not a good idea. That actually sounds like something I might come up with, and then you would tell me how stupid I was being.”
“I wouldn’t call you stupid.”
“You know what I mean, though. It makes sense that he wants to meet with you,” Tess said. “It’s probably about being safe with the information. And it’s like you said — he might need you to sign some documents, too.”
“Hmm. Should I have a lawyer look them over first?”
“Do you think that’s necessary? I mean, ordinarily I would say yes, but he’s a CEO. He probably has lawyers on staff who looked at the papers.”
“And you don’t think I need my own lawyer?”
“If you want, but I don’t think he’s trying to deceive you here. Even I don’t believe that. If you get there and he has papers for you, if you’re not comfortable with what you’re looking at, tell him you want them looked at before you’ll sign. That shouldn’t be such a big deal to him.”
“You’re right,” Maddie agreed.
“And in the meantime, go to this meeting. Maybe none of this lawyer business will even feel necessary to you once you get there. The sooner you can get access to this money, the better, right?”
“I don’t know,” Maddie said. “I mean, I know I should.”
“Come on, Maddie. Not wanting him to provide anything for you personally is one thing, but he should be taking care of your baby. That’s only right, and you know it.”
Maddie sighed. “I want to do it without his help,” she said. “I know I should get over that.”
“You should absolutely get over that. You can’t let your pride get in the way of doing the right thing for your baby.”
“But do I really need to meet with him? Surely he could just email me the account details, even if he doesn’t think texting is secure. Email ought to be safe enough.”
“I’m not going to pretend that I know what he’s thinking,” Tess said. “But if he wants to meet with you, you might have to do that. You might have to do this on his terms.”
“I can’t stand the idea of him setting terms.”
“Yeah, I bet not. But all you really need to do is get through this lunch, right? Then you’ll have the money he promised you, and you’ll be ready to start getting ready for your baby. I know it doesn’t feel like it, but actually, the sooner you get this sorted out with him, the sooner you can get him out of your life for good. And that will definitely be an improvement, right?”
Maddie was quiet.
“Oh,” Tess said, her eyebrows lifting. “Oh, I get it.”
“What do you get?”
“You know that this meeting will be the one where you cut ties with him — and you don’t want that to happen,” Tess said. “That’s why you’re hesitating. It isn’t because you don’t want to accept his money — at least, it isn’t only that. You also want to put this off as long as possible because you know that once the money is settled, there will be no reason for the two of you to see each other again.”
“That’s not what I was thinking,” Maddie protested.
“You might not have been thinking it, but it is the truth,” Tess said. “I know you pretty well, Maddie, and I know how you act when you’re afraid.”
“ Afraid ? Okay, I’m definitely not afraid of him.”
“Not of him. Afraid that this is the last time you two will see each other. You’re afraid of the way you feel about him. I think you’ve been afraid of that from the very start. You know that you stand to get hurt here.” Tess reached out and put her hand on top of Maddie’s. “I’m right, aren’t I?”
“I don’t know,” Maddie admitted softly. “I hate to think so. I don’t want you to be."
“Sure. I get it. It would be much easier if you could walk away from all this without having to feel anything. It would be easier if he didn’t matter to you, right? But you wouldn’t be in this situation if you didn’t have feelings for him, Maddie. You wouldn’t have slept with your boss if there weren’t feelings there. You’re too smart to do something like that for no reason. I know how hard you tried to avoid it. You tried to keep it from happening. The fact that you weren’t able to do that means you have feelings for him that were too big and too powerful for you to ignore.”
“Even if that’s true… it doesn’t matter, Tess. Eli doesn’t feel anything for me. If he did, he couldn’t have treated me like he did. I mean, there’s no way I could have treated him like that.”
“I know,” Tess said. “And I think there’s a part of you that’s holding out hope that he’ll realize how wrong he was and try to set things right.”
“Is that crazy of me?”
“It’s not crazy to want it,” Tess said gently. “But what you can’t do is let yourself keep hoping that it’s going to happen. You need to meet with him, get your affairs in order, and move on with your life. You owe yourself that, Maddie. You can’t live in limbo, waiting for him to realize he made a mistake. You’ve got to allow yourself to move on.”
Maddie sighed. “You’re right,” she said. “But it’s still hard to actually do it. You’re exactly right about what I’m thinking about it, and I didn’t realize it until you said it. I feel like, once we do this, it will cut all the ties between us. I feel like the baby should be this powerful bond, but it isn’t, and so the only thing I have left that connects me to him is the fact that he’s promised me this account.”
“That makes sense,” Tess said encouragingly.
“It’s pathetic, though,” Maddie said. “It’s like breaking up with a boyfriend and not giving him the chance to return your things because once that’s done, there will be no more reason for the two of you to see each other. I’m refusing to let this end because I can’t stand for it to be over, and that’s embarrassing.”
“Don’t be embarrassed,” Tess said. “You felt something for him. You still feel something for him.”
“He doesn’t feel anything for me.”
“Then he’s the one who ought to be embarrassed, not you. He’s the one who didn’t realize how good he could have had it. He’s the one who let you and that baby walk out of his life without a second look, and he’s the one who is going to have to live with that mistake forever. Think about it, Maddie. Ten years from now, you’ll know that you did everything you could. You told him about your pregnancy. You invited him to be involved. He could have been a part of this. But when he thinks back in ten years, all he’s going to be able to think about is the fact that he blew it.”
“I don’t know if I would feel better or worse about it all if I thought he was going to care about that,” Maddie said.
“Oh, he’s going to care, all right. Don’t forget, he has another child. He’ll never be able to stop thinking about this. When his kid graduates from college, gets married, achieves any milestone in life, Eli Sinclair will be stuck wondering about the child he doesn’t know. And he will never know what happened with this one. It’ll haunt him until the day he dies,” Tess assured her. “I don’t know whether that makes you feel better or worse either, and I’m not going to try to tell you what you should feel about it. But I’m confident that it’s the truth. He will always wonder, and he will never know.”
Maddie swallowed hard. Her friend was almost certainly right. Somehow, it made her feel better and worse at the same time. She wouldn’t have thought that was possible, and yet here they were.
“All right,” she said. “I’ll go and meet with him. We’ll get this settled once and for all.”
She was sure it would be the last time she ever saw Eli Sinclair.